Want to protest? Tell a story?
We are looking for between 10-15 volunteers to join us for a performative typographic workshop
at the Gerald Moore gallery on Sunday August the 12th. Working with the body’s potential
to form new words through movement and gesture, it will be your chance to take part
in a living work of art.

I will be leading a three hour workshop and participants will be invited to work together to create
a collaborative public performance on the day.

Sunday 12th August 2012
12-5pm

Workshop, 12th of August 2012

We want people to bring ideas along and work together as a group. It will be a fun day, and we will provide lunch and refreshments as well as a souvenir.

The workshop curated by George Vasey
Summer School is curated by Rosie Cooper and realised by Fay Nicolson

Booklet designed by Kaisa Lassinaro

http://www.geraldmooregallery.org/sub-links/letterform-for-the-ephemeral-expanded/

Sunday 12th August
The workshop starts at 12pm; phrases will be performed from 3pm
Gerald Moore Gallery at Eltham College
Mottingham Lane
Mottingham
SE9 4QF

T. 020 8857 0448
E. info [at] geraldmooregallery.org

By train:
The nearest train station is Mottingham or Grove Park. Direct trains take 20 minutes from London Bridge or 15 minutes from New Cross.

Other options:
Parking is available on site.
The 136 bus goes from Peckham to nearby Grove Park.

This picture of human arabic typography, reading تضاريس/Relief/Tadariss, was taken on the first day of a seminar on 3D typography I gave at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, Lebanon.

Working with Masters students in Art Direction and Multimedia, we a created choreography-based pluri-alphabetic piece allowing a group of people posing as human letterforms to express a word in English, then in French, and finally in Arabic in a few moves, reflecting on the Lebanese multi-lingual culture.

Alba 75 ans

The ALBA, where I was giving a one-week seminar on typography last month,
is celebrating its 75th anniversary next week.

For this occasion, the school asked me and the students to prepare something
to go on the massive banner that will cover the building during the festivities;
above is a sneak pic of the making of.
More soon.

Typographic performance at Liverpool Street Station (18:00:00 – 19:00:00)

For Clerkenwell Design Week 2011 DesignMarketo is setting up at the Farmiloe Building on St John Street in collaboration with the Barbican Art Centre. I will be giving a (free) workshop based on stop motion and typography, using the iconic building space as a grid to produce a human typeface.
Wednesday 25.05.11 from 2-4pm

Also: do not miss Alexandre Bettler‘s workshop on mobile typography:
Thursday 26.05.11 from 5-pm

24-26 May 2011
34, St John Street, London
EC1M 4AY

http://designmarketo.com/events/clerkenwell-design-week-2011/

I was also part of the 2010 edition of the Emerge show during London Design Week.
During the opening, guests were invited to pose as human letterforms/numbers
and were given a polaroid of their mini-performance (instant typography deserves
instant photography, doesn’t it?).

“All is flux, nothing stays still, no man ever steps twice in the same river“, observed Heraclites.
This intelligent (because human) letterform allows a message to change from an instant to another, in an attempt to reflect on the fleeting quality of the moment.
It is flexible enough to keep the message relevant and up to date as its context changes, but also has the visual presence of a giant billboard.

As seen on webcam on http://www.abbeyroad.co.uk/visit/ on the 29/10/2009 between 14h07 and 14h37 GMT

In this phase of the project, ephemeral typography is used to induce people to feel the weight of passing time,
with its flow symbolically interrupted by halting the traffic.
This typographic performance was only recorded by taking screenshots of the images transmitted by a public webcam (showing the iconic Abbey Road crossing) onto a computer.

As this medium displays one “real-time” image every 4  seconds, a fraction of second seems to be extended
for the length of time necessary for the image to be refreshed.
Using a public webcam to display a message also considerably broadens its audience.

An everlasting choreography referencing the (real) passing of time, people standing as the Hours moving only once every 60 minutes, while the one acting as the tenths of Seconds executes a very fast routine in a continual move.
This image is a screenshot of this work.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau creates a relationship between the metropolis and its inhabitants on one side, and the practice of writing and speaking on the other side, and how they are “writing an urban text
as they move through it”.

A given message evolves in perpetual flux and its context is permanently shifting, regardless if its support is an advert or public signage.

Who is its audience? Where is it read? What is the weather like? What is everyone talking about on that day?
Are they in a hurry? Does it smell of hotdogs as they’re reading it?
A static printed message cannot adapt to a changing situation; it therefore belongs to the platonic ideal world rather than the hic et nunc (here and now) of the real world.

Recently, a bomb-sprayed piece of graffiti on a wall, reading “Time doesn’t exist, clocks exist”, drew my attention to two layers coexisting in the perception of time. One refers to the flowing entity, while the other invokes the intellectual, man-made structure that we use to sequence events and place them in a chronology.
The notion of time also opposes the mathematical abstraction calculating periods of time and the concrete mechanism of clocks counting its passage.

This begs the question: is there something called Time, other than the counting activity? Isn’t the consciousness of time a typically human experience?

The final experiment of this research took place in a busy train station during rush hour, in order to reflect the flow characteristic of the place. It involved eight people mimicking a digital clock in real time with their arms and shoulders. Standing in line side by side in the middle of the station, two of them acted as the hours units, two for the minutes, and another two for the seconds. The two other performers were acting as the colons separating each unit of time. The wearable letterform, with its specific flexibility, allowed the message (in this case Time) to change from one second to the other, following more or less accurately the ticking of the station’s clock.
The numbers each of the performers enacted were enhanced by day-glow long-sleeved boleros, which besides making them visible, also echoed the yellow of the train schedule boards above them.
Used in this specific context and by using people as a medium, this temporary letterform confronts the economic value of time (as in time is money) with the individual perception of it.

As seen at Liverpool Street Station on the 23/10/2009 between 18:00:00 and 19:00:00

The final outcome of this experiment is its recording, in the form of a set of photographs fixing the message in the time, space and audience (commuters in a rush) it was addressed to. The letterform was contextual at the actual moment it was mimicked. What is left is a trace of it, as the message displayed (the time the photograph was taken) will not be accurate anymore when looking at the photograph. What was achieved with this latest experiment of wearable type was a hic et nunc letterform, a letterform for the here and now, finding its raison d’être when used in real time.

This is an experiment on wearable lettering.
It started as a series of three day-glow and black tee-shirts, each with a slightly different pattern that becomes different highly visible letters when seen from a distance, providing that the wearer places his arms and body in a specific way.

When wearing these tee shirts, a group of people can form a word, a sentence or a statement. Because a single person can mimic a whole set of letters, the message can change, from one movement to another.

The flexibility of this letterform being slightly jeopardized by the fact that one single tee shirt couldn’t be used to make every letter, I started to think the wearable typography as a bolero instead: a pair of day-glow sleeves attached together by a strip of fabric that could be worn across the front or the back of the wearer.

This new pattern allowed the wearer to become any letter, number or punctuation mark in a small move.